1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the invention relate generally to graphics processing, and more specifically to tracking and accessing state change methods in a graphics pipeline.
2. Description of the Related Art
Graphics hardware maintains state about the current configuration of the various pipeline stages used to perform rendering. Some examples are the state of the blending hardware used for raster operations or the state of the stencil or depth test functions. The exact image generated by the graphics hardware for display is a function of all the prior state change methods (i.e., state change commands) that the driver has sent to configure the graphics pipeline. This serialization of state makes the generation of image data based on those state change methods very difficult in a multi-threaded or multi-core driver environment since the state for different threads may be different and the driver may not be able to determine the state that is currently used by the graphics pipeline.
Accordingly, what is needed is a technique for accessing prior state change methods in a multi-threaded or multi-core driver environment.